Judging Well

I’ve been a member of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) for almost fifteen years. Recently at our local Meeting (for Worship) I was asked to give a short talk on Discernment. This is it…

There are several definitions that you can call on: the ability to decide between truth and error, the ability to choose between right and wrong and the one I like best: the ability to judge well. In the New Testament there is a passage in John’s Gospel which says “do not believe every spirit but test the spirits to see they are from God”.

If I’m away from work and home for just a week I usually come back to a mountain of emails, voicemails and text messages. Magazines and letters will be building like castles on the desk, lying in wait. But that’s just what’s visible. It’s the invisible or the unspoken that I try to find. Discovering that which matters most to my family, my team or indeed anyone in my life is what’s really important.

Every day I make judgement calls. Every day, every hour and every minute. I think we all do. We decide whether or not we like someone, whether they are honest or not, whether they are good or bad. Often we base this on very little information. We add meaning, we make assumptions and then adopt beliefs about how the world works. He’s a Traveller. All Travellers are thieves. He’s a priest. All priests are all locked in by dogma. She’s overweight. Couldn’t she help herself? There’s a name for this thought process. It is called the Ladder of Inference. So then how should we discern?

One of my best friends was Moira Gillespie. Moira sadly died a few years ago. Had you visited her home you might have seen a small prism hanging by a thread in front of a large bay window in her living room. When the sun shone through, it split the light into an array of beautiful colours. I often think of that little prism as a metaphor for what happens at our Meeting. When I think of it I imagine it working in reverse, where all the colours come together to focus on what matters most: the white light, or the light of the Spirit, that still small voice that is such an important part of all of our lives.

Even Quakers sometimes forget exactly how ’small’ that voice can be. To really discern the truth you have to listen well because in the midst of all the hustle and bustle it can be hard to hear. To quote from John O’Donoghue: The voice inside us that brings wisdom rarely shouts.

So it helps hugely that we have this time and space on a Sunday together where we can see the full spectrum of colours in all their diversity shine through the prism that is our Meeting for Worship and allow the light of the Spirit to be made visible. In that way we discern the truth and judge well.